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Creative Gives In, They Open-Source Their X-Fi Driver

11-06-2008, 03:10 PM

Phoronix: Creative Gives In, They Open-Source Their X-Fi Driver

The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

Comment

Creative's not making money anyway, so they don't have much to lose. At least this makes their fanboys happy. I can't believe how many Linux users own X-fi's, considering how horrible the support is, but apparently some people are happy making ill-informed purchases and being brand slaves.

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I wish I hadn't bought this stupid soundcard two years ago. I did know it was supposed to be a linux machine, but since I had such good experiences with linux hardware support, I figured I wouldn't have any problems.

So of course I buy an ATI graphics card and a Creative X-Fi.... oh brother.

Things have finally shaped up though. I now have 100% open source drivers running on my system.

Comment

Creative's not making money anyway, so they don't have much to lose. At least this makes their fanboys happy. I can't believe how many Linux users own X-fi's, considering how horrible the support is, but apparently some people are happy making ill-informed purchases and being brand slaves.

Come on, everbody has a litte masochist inside himself

Well, I do not own a X-Fi but back in early 2004 I was impressed by the Audigy2 cards. Today I think a onboard card, like an ALC888, is sufficient. X-Fi makes sense if you are a (hardcore)gamer under Windows.